"The Man In The Background"

[GangsterOnBoats]

For the past year or so, I have been working on an important piece of music, which really has been a long hard journey. I started recording in November for a demo and did all of the guitar work and drums. Over the past month or two, my brother Jay (who goes under the name PrismEye on here) added bass and keyboards (along with some preliminary mixing and fixing my stupid errors).

 

Though I have yet to record my vocals for the song yet, we have decided to unveil a working demo of the song. Of course, there are some fixes to the mix to be made and other things to be added, but we felt it was in a state to "road test" it on you guys.

 

Although I have had many different influences throughout, my primary ones would have to be the guitar work of Andrew Latimer (his use of the harmonic minor scale is absolutely beautiful) and Allan Holdsworth (perhaps the greatest guitar player to walk the earth).

 

"The Man In The Background" begins with the sounds of guitar chords fading in (resembling an organ or keyboard sound). The first 7 or so minutes of the piece are very much fusion based, which is how I've been writing recently. Throughout, there is a progressive edge to the song, with varying time signatures and instrumentation. The second 2/3 of the song are composed of a very progressive solo section which, in addition to vocals to be added later, features several guitar, synth, and bass solos. I hope you all enjoy it, and please let me know what you think!

 

You can hear the song and download it here.

 

Some highlights to listen for in the song:

 

0:00- Beginning of the song (duh!), but also faded in guitar chords

0:44- Introduction of rest of instruments

3:10- First Synth Solo

4:07- Start of 6/8 section, featuring harmonized guitar interplay

6:55- Guitar parts that sound like the howling in hades

8:55- Crazy odd time signatures synth solo

9:28- Crazy odd time signatures guitar solo

11:49- Bass solo featuring fretted and fretless bass playing

12:37- 2nd guitar solo (harmonic minor solo)

14:01- Section that Jay calls "hell" because there are so many harmonizing guitar parts that it made mixing a living hell

15:03- Final guitar solo

19:26- Return of the main theme

19:55- Big, out of key, final chord

20:12- End

 

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